As soon as Pamela Capalad moved to New York, her mother urged her to buy a house rather than pay rent. That was five years ago.

But Ms. Capalad, now 27, wasn’t ready; not quite. “I’m like, I can’t even navigate the subway system yet!” she recalled.

She shared a rented apartment in a two-family row house in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She lucked out: her share, with two roommates, was an impossibly cheap $400 a month. She knew she would be able to save for a down payment.

Her boyfriend, Brian Kushner, now 32, rented nearby, in the artist-filled Opera House Lofts. They had met through one of Mr. Kushner’s revolving cast of roommates. Mr. Kushner also paid $400.

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Bed-Stuy A two-family house on Pulaski Street was just the thing. But it was still in probate, and the fear was there might be a long wait.CreditDolly Faibyshev for The New York Times

Two years ago Ms. Capalad, who works as a financial planner and is also an author of a financial-literacy curriculum for middle school, decided she was ready to start house-hunting. She wanted a two- or three-family so she could rent out the other units.

“I am a big believer in practicing what I preach,” she said. “One way to gain passive income is to collect rent.”

Her budget, which would include her mother’s help with the down payment, topped out at about $425,000. She was finicky about location — her home had to be within a few blocks of one of five specific M-train stations in Bushwick or nearby Bedford-Stuyvesant.

In fall 2010 she found it: a two-family house for $450,000 on Pulaski Street on the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Ms. Capalad intended to allow the top-floor tenant, an elderly woman, to remain.

She negotiated the price to $415,000. But it was an estate sale and she found herself “stuck in the vortex of probate court” for three months. With no definite transaction date, she sadly canceled the contract.

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Bushwick Someone else snatched up a run-down three-family house on Grove Street. Too bad: it was close to a subway stop.CreditDolly Faibyshev for The New York Times

Later, a boarded-up three-family house on Grove Street in Bushwick caught her eye, but she was too late. It sold to someone else for $222,000.

“I pined away for this for months, because I can see it from my train stop,” Ms. Capalad said.

Three-families were selling especially quickly, said John Chetram of Charles Rutenberg Realty, her agent. “Everyone jumps on them because they can get more rental income to offset their bottom line.”

What’s more, “Pam was being outpriced and outbid,” he said, with other buyers offering all cash.

She was outbid on a well-maintained two-family owned by a retired couple on Willoughby Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It sold for $450,000.

“That one was so tragic,” Ms. Capalad said, “because that house was beautiful and in such a great location and the couple was so nice.”

Then, the plan changed. She and Mr. Kushner decided to buy a place together. They let her mother off the hook, but without her help, their budget fell to the low $300,000s. They focused on foreclosures and short sales, most of which were in terrible condition. They were approved for the Federal Housing Administration’s 203(k) loan program, which is designed to finance both purchase and renovation.

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Bushwick With no suitable house on the horizon, the buyers considered a one-bedroom condominium on Flushing Avenue.CreditDolly Faibyshev for The New York Times

Agents rarely got back to them. They heard things like “ ‘It’s not showing, we are taking only all-cash offers and we meant to take it off the market,’ ” Ms. Capalad said. In some cases, houses came with “tenant-kicking-out issues,” which both found unsavory, Mr. Kushner said.

“Every time I walked into a house with that kind of vibe, I bristled,” Ms. Capalad said. Sometimes, “I walked into the kids’ room and they were staring me down and I was, like, ‘I have to go, I can’t do this.’ ”

Last spring, fearing they would never find the right house, they checked out apartments. They saw a one-bedroom that would do, in an eight-unit condominium on Flushing Avenue in Bushwick. The price was around $300,000.

“We panicked,” Mr. Kushner said. “We were like five years too late to get something affordable for nonrich folks. The condo was affordable and not terrible.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Capalad was e-mailing the agent representing a two-family place, bank-owned, on Hart Street in Bushwick. The listing price was $280,000.

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Bushwick In the end, a bank-owned two-family house on Hart Street saved the day. In sad shape, it needed some saving itself.CreditDolly Faibyshev for The New York Times

The agent invariably replied that it wasn’t ready to be seen — but Ms. Capalad was heartened to receive any response at all. She made a final attempt to schedule a viewing, saying they were on the verge of committing to another property.

They got in. “The house was trashed from top to bottom,” she said. “I fell in love with it.” There was space for a music studio for Mr. Kushner, a musician known as Dyalekt, and a backyard for his dog, Vinyl.

“It had that love-at-first-sight spark,” Mr. Kushner said. “I could see us raising our kids in the house.”

The purchase price was $190,000, with another $145,000 available for renovations.

People joked that “short sales are anything but short,” Ms. Capalad said. “They weren’t kidding. We ran into a new, seemingly made-up rule every day.”

The couple closed on the deal last summer. During renovations, which are ongoing, they faced delay after delay. “There were so many you-can’t-make-this-up moments,” said Ms. Capalad, who blogs about her house adventures at sowerebuyingahouse.wordpress.com. They don’t expect to move in until summer.

They were excited about doing over the place to suit themselves, Mr. Kushner said, “but we also went in blind and really didn’t know what was going on. We had researched a lot and spoken to a number of people. It’s not like we were wholly unprepared, but somehow we were still wholly unprepared.”

After the recent snow, they had a sidewalk to clear for the first time. All four stores they tried were sold out of shovels. A neighbor lent them his.

Correction:Feb. 24, 2013

The Hunt column last Sunday, about a young woman and her boyfriend who were looking for a two- or three-family house in Brooklyn, misspelled her given name. As an accompanying picture caption correctly noted, she is Pamela Capalad, not Pamala.